TasMot’s Techdirt Comments

...and it unlocks some interesting design options: not only can a pair of shoes be customized, each shoe can be designed separately. Will people want to experiment with asymmetrical footwear?

There is no experiment here. My feet are only slightly different, however; there is a whole exchange program for amputees with only one real foot! Now they could could order just the shoe they need without trying to find someone else on the exchange program that needs the other foot and likes the same styles.

Not So Sure About CNN Caving

Another way to look at this from CNN's point of view is that by "caving" they don't have to pay their lawyers $500/hr. to argue that the Circle-R Ranch symbol is not needed. Just include it for a few more weeks and then "forget" to put it in again until the Oscars idiots come complaining again. Let them keep paying the lawyers to show up and say "Hey You Forgot the stupid Circle-R again". CNN doesn't need a lawyer to do anything except send the "Ooops, forgot" letter again. In a little while the $#% @#$! show will be over and done with for another year and by then they will have to start the Circle-R all over again.

If CNN were really smart, they would pull a Google and just stop talking about the #@$# %^% show until they come begging with cash in hand for CNN to talk about it.

Generally speaking, Disney has been smart about following the money. With ESPN, the money WILL be down soon.

We should see Disney spinning off ESPN soon as it's own company (and probably overvalued and burdened with debt) or selling it outright for whatever it can get. Wall street is still somewhat blind to cord cutting so they could get away with it and they still do have some long term cable contracts. But, with cord cutters and cord nevers growing, ESPN's demise in its current form is going to be a short story.

WOW, how can I get on that gravy train? What city wants to pay me millions of dollars to "maybe" develop something useful 10 to 20 years down the line. I feel that I should ask how stupid do the politicians have to be to pay AT&T to develop something for them but I realize that in reality they are smart enough to get "contributions" to their political aspirations and post-political career jobs lined up for signing significant contracts. Hooray for legislative capture and revolving public-private doors. At least I won't be footing the bill in Chicago. Yeah for me!!!

Re:

They are hiding with the dragons and unicorns waiting until they "feel" like you did something they don't like, then they dig through all the arcane parts of copyright law and look for some way to make an accusation of infringement so that they can get some free money.

Automatic Copyright Extensions

All these copyright extensions seem to do is to promote the filing of lawsuits. No matter what the result of the case, poor old dead Edith will never get a penny of the royalties and will never write another poem. Her daughters on the other hand might get a big settlement for DOING NOTHING.

Way to go copyright for providing an incentive for ..., wait, nothing is going to be created out of this except a payment. What did the constitution say about creating a payment for doing nothing? I can't seem to find that clause anywhere in there. Could somebody find that clause for me?

Somebody get that corpse out of the ground and give her a drink, would ya? After all, she inspired the writing of another set of legal briefs and some money for lawyers.

Cue the lawsuit

I know that the actual purpose of class action lawsuits is to make lawyers rich, but in this case they will probably get a lot of money from Phillips on the "bait and switch" argument.

Hey people who have money that we want to have, here is this great system that will control all of the lightbulbs in your house so you don't have to use those pesky wall switches anymore. OOOOPPPS, now that you gave us all that money, now you can only buy our "Special" lightbulbs because those other lightbulbs from the competitors will no longer work with our system. Thanks for all the money

Re:

However; Law Enforcement Officials are reminding everyone that they are not allowed to point their personal body cams at Law Enforcement Officers while they are being paid by tax dollars just in case they were to get caught on video doing something they are not supposed to be doing, that would be bad.

Otherwise, please feel free to film everybody else and send the video of them doing something bad with complete identifying information so that we can go pick them up without having to work very hard. That would be great.

What would be interesting to follow but we will probably never hear about is how long it will take residents to learn to create virtual machine images that can spin up without the "mandated" encryption bypass. Then they can spin up an image, do there private business that can be kept private, then delete that session as though nothing happened.

Re:

Your forgot to mention: Roads Telephones Utility Power Airlines Trains Cars Clothes - the clothing manufacturers should be shot too - they sell ISIS clothes that helps them fit-in with a crowd and scissors, I but they use scissors too - they might even live dangerously and run with them

Why is it that the Internet is so horrendously foul when they use all of these other things too...

Ban it all I say.....all of those things can be used by the terrorists.....especially clothes, let's get rid of clothes!

This is "Thought Crime 101"

Look at how easy it is to look good getting someone thrown in jail for a long time because they were told about a way to grab money from bad people, a victim-less crime. Who wouldn't want to remove money from the drug lords?

But hey, who cares if some alleged loser goes to jail for a fantasy crime of robbing fantasy money from a fantasy drug house with a fantasy drug lord who has fantasy guards.

It makes it easy on the "Law Enforcement Officers" because there is no real danger for them (after all, they have full control over the entire fantasy) and the only "guns and explosives" involved are the fantasy ones they provide to the dupe who is walking into the jail sentence.

This is sooooooo much easier than going out and catching real criminals and so much safer. This dupe is going to be somebody's girlfriend until long after the LEO's retire. The public is no safer, the LEOs look good, the dupe goes to jail, and the public has to foot the bill. Yeah Us!

They are all about Customer Aquisition not Customer Retention

One of the problems with the Cable Industry (and there seem to be many) is that they are not willing to mature. Most industries go through 5 phases, startup, growth, maturity, decline, extinction (remember I did say most). The Cable Industry does not want to enter the maturity stage. They want to keep growing. Note that it is hard to get away from the wonderful sounding "new customer" plans; however, once a customer the continuous rounds of price increases in continuous pressure to add new services. They seem to want to skip the maturity phase where customer retention is key. They don't do anything to keep their customer happy, especially where there is very little in the way of competition. At some point maybe they will begin to notice that the customer base is not growing anymore and they will need to start paying attention to retaining customers with retention specials and start reducing the new customer specials.

Re: Why Won't The Backdoor Concept Die?

how is this the same John McCain who was on the other side during the last crypto wars?

Why Won't the Backdoor Concept Die?

I think the answer to both of these questions is actually going to be the very old saw "Follow The Money". It would not surprise me at all to find out who is constantly putting up the money to keep pushing this agenda.

The bad part is that the supposed bad guys they want to catch are not going to use the broken encryption. They are going to keep using the existing good encryption and create more "NOT BROKEN" encryption and use that.

Only those US citizens forced to use the broken encryption will be exposed (to everybody in the world) and anybody with a little bit of brains will be adding their own un-broken encryption on top of the broken encryption.

One fall-out I hope they are preparing for is the increased costs to business as people lose faith in the "non" security of online transactions and banks, stores, and government offices are going to have to start hiring a lot more workers to service the people who have to come to the store/shop/office/tellers to transact business because all of the online security will be broken.

"Zarrelli Reputation" - Search this on Google

Ok, I'm just a poor schmo gettin' by from day to day (impatiently waiting for the next chuckle from a TechDirt article). So just out of curiousity I did a search on Google (OK, I googled it) for "Zarrelli Reputation". I mean after all, his whole business is reputation management, right? So the first FOUR pages of results are about how bad he is doing a managing his own reputation and some of the articles are feeling sorry about the clients that hired him.

Actually, this could mean that there is going to be more fun reading here. That's about 40 to 60 lawsuits against various blogs and publications that are (what did he say):

harass, stalk, libel, and cyber bully me online

Come on, I'm already starting to salivate at all the articles on TechDirt about this little "Zarelli Circus of Legal Entertainment".

Strangely enough, in working some Google magic, I could not find an article with a "positive" reference to Zarelli. Only articles about how badly he has messed up. I guess with everybody talking about his clown act, maybe he is hoping that no one will remember his client's activities. He's created the "Zarelli Google Trick". It's heavily patterned after the Jedi mind trick but is not a story of fiction and doesn't actually work. It is however entertaining.

I hope George Lucas doesn't sue him though; for creating a derivative work without paying for a license.

No Comments Allowed on BULR

Since the author and readers of the Boston University Law Review may not also be readers of TechDirt, I went to their website to post a comment so that they could react to your rebuttal of the author's claims. Funny, no comments allowed. It appears that the Law Review, you know, those lawyer types, don't want to deal with the pesky 1st Amendment problems of dealing with comments. They just want to post random opinions of lawyers, you know the ones that support the laws of the land in court. If they had some experience with comments, maybe they would have their own push back against her very one sided fact free article.

How About Real Accountability

First: Define where there is a needSecond: Obtain evidence that there is actually a lackThird: Allow an ISP to build out the network to alleviate the needFourth: Verify that the network that WAS missing is NOW in placeFinally: Then, pay a portion of the cost that is above the normal build out cost. After all, the ISP is going to be charging for this build out for years to come.

Time Warner Cable isn't particularly in-tune with the value-needs of his typical customer, but executives like Marcus are going to have to pull their collective heads of of the sand post haste if they want to minimize the impact of the Internet video revolution, and the cheaper, more flexible channel options they insist nobody wants.

Nope, executives like Marcus are putting their $85 million in the bank and looking the other way. He/They don't care what anybody else wants, they got their money. How else are they going to get all that money if they don't take it from their customers?